Lightning Network should allow it to be used as a currency.
Doesn't work if the exchange rate moves too quickly.
But even without use as currency, it can still be a good investment.
If you have a high tolerance for risk then maybe. You might have better odds in Vegas though.
Nobody uses gold as currency, but still they invest in it.
Gold has tangible uses aside from serving as an investment vehicle and it isn't generally very volatile relative to the dollar over short time periods. Hard to say the same about bitcoin.
No there isn't. Businesses mostly use payment gateways that sell the BTC immediately. There's no risk of price fluctuation to the business.
"Immediately" doesn't mean what you think it means. We're talking minutes to hours here which in the financial world is a far cry from "instant" and that means substantial exchange rate risk. On an asset that is fluctuating by double digit percentages within a few days that can mean a very substantial difference in value from the start of an exchange transaction to the finish. Saying there is no risk of price fluctuation is quite simply wrong.
Why ? Bitcoin is not a stock, and the Bitcoin exchanges don't function like stock markets.
If you are buying bitcoin hoping it will appreciate in value relative to the dollar then it is a secondary market and as such it functions almost identically to a stock market as a practical matter. Bitcoin is just an asset like gold or beenie babies or pork bellies or frozen concentrated orange juice. Any discussion about the "value" of bitcoin is by definition in relation to how many dollars you can get for it which is no different than asking what the current price of a stock is in dollars. Stocks are assets and so is bitcoin.
Late Wednesday, finance author Ben Carlson wrote: Bitcoin has achieved something I've always wanted to see in the stock mkt - a reverse 1987 (20% gain in a single day)
Whoever wrote that is an idiot. No we do not want to see that kind of volatility in the market, positive or negative. That is NOT a good thing. Any time something skyrockets that fast in price it is pretty much invariably because something weapons grade irrational and/or criminal is going on. This is what happens with pump and dump schemes and those rarely end happily.
I think it's more accurate to say that not all plastic products can be economically recycled.
I did say exactly that. ("A depressing percentage of the plastic products sold cannot be economically recycled") We agree.
It isn't, for example, economical to recycle single-use plastic bags because they contain so little plastic that transporting them is likely to use more oil than you recover from the bags. And polystyrene is mostly air, which has the same problem. But that's really an issue with the way the plastics are used rather than something fundamental to the material.
Yep. I think this is going have to be something that gets regulated at some point. I don't like the idea of doing that but I don't see a feasible alternative. It's kind of a tragedy of the commons situation. It's cheap for us individually to use a disposable plastic fork but expensive for society in the long run thanks to the pollution and wasted energy.
I think the arguments that we're going to be mining trash heaps in the future for plastic are preposterous. There are FAR too many hydrocarbons yet to be mined to make digging up trash heaps economically viable. It's simply likely to remain cheaper to make new plastic from fresh fossil fuels. Even if we somehow run out of oil, gas and coal without rendering the planet uninhabitable in the process, there are bioplastics. I think the difficult bit will be to keep people from making fresh plastic (esp one use) when we do not need to. Perhaps more pressing will be solving the problem of microbeads and similar plastic waste.
The only one I'm aware of that would truly be uneconomical because of the nature of the material is PVC, and even that is improving, I think.
I'm not about to dig into the math (just don't care that much) and I'm highly dubious of what I've read regarding power consumption but if bitcoin is truly that power hungry and inefficient then it is doomed to failure. It simply will cost more than the alternatives and that matters greatly. Sure some people can make some profits playing a game of who's the greater fool but that is a bubble that will pop sooner or later. It's just another tulip craze. It has to have some economic advantage over other currencies to be worth the bother in the long run to most people.
Basically some people are spending a huge amount of money trying to convert energy into bitcoin and bitcoin transactions in the hopes that the price will rise enough to make it worth the investment. Might work in the short run but there is a LOT of risk there.
If it creates a worldwide non-government controlled currency, it will be worth the struggle.
You say that as if it is somehow axiomatic. I reject your framing of the argument. If you can provide some airtight argument that government involvement in currency has some fatal flaw then please provide it and collect your Nobel prize. But frankly I don't buy the argument that bitcoin or any analog of it really fixes any problems in any form of government issued currency without creating new and potentially worse ones in the process. If you distrust governments as a philosophical position I can understand that but it doesn't automatically follow that because governments aren't perfect that a solution that doesn't involve them will necessarily be better.
Then of course there is the problem that there is absolutely no way that governments are going to allow a currency that they have no influence over. Even if government leaders honestly and earnestly wanted to not be involved with the currency the first moment there is a dip in the market there will be people screaming for the government to do something about the problem. The governments would HAVE to be involved in regulating currency even if they didn't want to. Not to mention that truly unregulated markets tend to crash and burn hard. There will never be a currency market without government regulation no matter what the mechanics of the currency might be.
Bitcoin wasn't intended to be an investment instrument.
They created a cash analog and didn't think it would be used as an investment vehicle? Then they are (as I suspected) imbeciles with little understanding of economics and less of people. Kind of like the programmers in the early days of networks that failed to secure their networks because they naively trusted other people's incentives to match their own.
Its creators envisioned it as a replacement for money itself -- a decentralized, secure, anonymous method for transferring value between people.
It's not a replacement for money because it IS a form of money for all practical purposes. Just because it isn't a fiat currency doesn't change that fact. But like any asset (including currency) it will be used both for transactions and as a mechanism to profit directly through trading of that asset. If there is a profit to be made you can be sure someone will try to make it.
Simply put, bitcoin is slowing the effort to achieve a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. What's more, this is just the beginning. Given its rapidly growing climate footprint, bitcoin is a malignant development, and it's getting worse. Digital financial transactions come with a real-world price: The tremendous growth of cryptocurrencies has created an exponential demand for computing power
Exponential? Let's grant that for the sake of argument. Even if true it doesn't mean it is appropriate to extrapolate naively. Just because it might be experiencing fast growth today does not imply that it will continue to do so tomorrow. You have to give some reason why it MUST be expected to continue to grow at that rate which this article fails to do.
Today, each bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power nine homes in the U.S. for one day.
Oh bullshit. That's just preposterous on the face of it unless you are using an incredibly stupid (and faulty) form of accounting and assigning all the power costs for every computer involved in the transaction and presuming it does nothing else.
And that power-hungry network is currently increasing its energy use every day by about 450 gigawatt-hours, roughly the same amount of electricity the entire country of Haiti uses in a year.
Again, I call bullshit. This sounds like hollywood accounting to me to try to scare people. I think bitcoin is kind of idiotic but I would need a LOT of serious evidence before I seriously believe this sort of outlandish claim.
Those are very much the exception rather than the rule; wood stands up to hot/cold cycles and UV rays far better than plastic, is more comfortable to grip than plastic (especially in extreme temps) and doesn't off-gas a cocktail of cancer-causing and endocrine-disrupting vapors.
Plastic isn't a single chemical. There are all sorts of plastics with all sorts of properties. For particular applications many of them easily outperform wood. Wood can be a fine thing to use too but to pretend that it outperforms plastic as a general proposition without specifying the application is simply willful ignorance or confirmation bias.
Unlike using oil for powering cars, you don't destroy the oil when you turn it into plastics. You can heat it, optionally crack and reform the polymer chains to turn it into an entirely new kind of plastic, and turn it into something else.
Not true for all plastics. Not because of technical problems but because it isn't economically profitable to do so. It's cheaper to put them in a landfill and make new plastic out of oil products than it is to go to the expense and trouble of recycling them.
If anyone is actually using incinerators on plastics rather than separating them for recycling, that is, of course, short-sighted idiocy.
A depressing percentage of the plastic products sold cannot be economically recycled. Only plastics of select chemical compositions are accepted for recycling most places.
We should compare things like micro-hydro power with fossil fuels.
Compare them for what? Subsistence living? Small scale hydro is a Good Thing but for most people it's hardly going to be enough to meaningfully displace fossil fuels except as a very small part of a larger energy portfolio. Solar and wind are far more practical in most circumstances, even for local generation. I couldn't use micro-hydro anywhere close to my house because it's so geographically dependent and it's not an option at all for almost anyone not living in a fairly remote area.
Fossil fuels put the poor at the mercy of global markets, disappearing and becoming more expensive every time there is a war or the wrong kind of financial crisis.
No reasonably foreseeable amount of small scale local power generation is going to change that fact. Even if I put enough renewable energy into my house to power all my needs (including an EV), that still won't affect the impact on of fluctuating energy costs on manufacturing, transport, and agriculture. Modern agriculture is basically the process of turning diesel fuel into food and nearly all our transport systems are tied to fossil fuels currently. What needs to be emphasized is that we need a diverse portfolio of energy sources to mitigate economic disruptions from geopolitics. An important part of this will be local generation (solar roofs, etc) but we'll also need technologies for transport that aren't tied to fossil fuels (EVs) and for fossil fuels to actually have to bear the full cost of the pollution they generate.
And yes you are quite right about one use plastics. That's a much bigger problem than most people realize.
Bacteria that had not been there during the launch of the ISS module were found on the swabs,
Umm, how would they possibly know that the bacteria was not there? It's not as if they have some means of sterilizing on the launch pad and It's not hard to show how a previously unknown bacteria could have been missed. Not to mention that there is such a thing as mutations, particularly in a high radiation environment.
So they have flown from somewhere in space and settled on the outside hull.
Unless they have some means to conclusively rule out all sources of terrestrial contamination (and they do not) then this is the same sort of idiotic thinking that makes people think a UFO = alien visitors when they are forgetting what the U in UFO stands for.
I've seen non-gold coax cables bind to the other receptacle and contacts tear off because they were not gold plated and were two different metals, like tin and copper. Gold works as a great in-between that keeps my items from binding.
Not arguing that there aren't applications for gold plating. There certainly are. Most common use is for corrosion resistance since gold is relatively non-reactive compared with other common metals used in conductors. Point is that such applications are the exception rather than the rule and that most gold plating on consumer applications are a waste of money, brains and time.
So you understood what he meant, I understood what he meant, everyone understood what he meant, he used common language terms that everyone uses, and yet you criticized him for it?
I didn't criticize him, I corrected his terminology and hopefully educated in the process. By your userID number you've been here long enough to know that if you say something technically inaccurate someone will correct you. It's happened to me too and I learn things when it happens. Just because lay people commonly say something incorrect does not in the world of engineering make it correct. Just because people commonly refer to concrete as cement does not mean that they are the same thing. Concrete is a composite material bonded together with cement but cement is not concrete and no amount of common parlance will make it the correct term. Same with connectors versus contacts. Contacts are a component of a connector. Saying "gold plated connector" isn't the correct terminology and I don't think it is asking the sorts of geeks that hang out here to be accurate with their terminology. We don't have to reduce ourselves to marketing speak here.
This is what makes dealing with some specialists (like yourself) so much harder than it has any need to be.
Only to self righteous people such as yourself. Calm down. I said up front that it was a pedantic point and said it to ensure clarity and educate.
As the average person buys the entire assembly, and not just a contact, the relevant comparison is the price of the entire assembly, not the price of the component. So "isn't all that expensive" is completely accurate.
Except it often is not accurate at all. That's the point. I buy this stuff for a living and I know exactly how much it costs. Sometimes the cost of gold plating is a rounding error and sometimes it's a double digit percentage of the cost. Depends on the product. You cannot make a blanked statement that gold plating isn't expensive until you actually can evaluate the bill of materials for that product and know something about the labor content involved. What you can say as a blanket statement is that the vast majority of the time (over 99%) it is unnecessary and needlessly increases costs.
This is the one place you're completely correct.
Gee thanks for the condescension. I'm glad you know more about what I do for a living than I do.
What about them? Unless you have gold plated every component in a connector assembly, saying gold plated connector remains an inaccurate description. I cannot recall ever seeing such a beast though perhaps they do exist for some weird reason.
You don't test software by looking at the code. You test the software by testing it. If it ain't broken, you're not testing hard enough.
Doing a black box analysis of software when the code should be available for review by a defendant is so wrong headed I barely know where to start There is NO place for secret code when it comes to convicting people of crimes. The defendant should be able to question any and all methods being used to accuse them of a crime.
While I'm very pro-OSS, I'm anti forcing private companies to disclose their source code.
Tell me that when you are facing a life sentence and you aren't allowed to examine the code being used to send you to jail. If we're talking about a word processor, who cares but when we're talking about felony convictions for crimes I see no value to society in companies being allowed to keep such code private.
Arguably, the program can be evaluated without the source code.
At considerable expense. But even then it still is a problem because you would have to do it for every single case. Otherwise you have no way to know if something is different or wrong with the analysis in a case where no verification was conducted.
Simply use known samples and examine the output. Do the results of the analysis match what was known about the samples?
You're talking about using controls and/or independent testing methods. Not really good enough because if there is a discrepancy you run into Segal's Law (a man with a watch knows the time and a man with two is never sure). You have no way to know which test (if either) is the correct one. You would need to do those sorts of independent verification but you still cannot really accept any analysis in a court of law where the defendant cannot evaluate the methodology used to accuse them.
Only an idiot claims that an upgrade is needed when it will not be needed for the foreseeable future.
Who are you to decide what other people might need in the foreseeable future? You have to have the hardware in place for people to develop content for it. Some people probably have a use for 10K content even if you lack the imagination to see what it is today.
Sometimes they gold plate the housing since many of them are made of metal and in some cases they serve some transmission purposes, usually ground but occasionally signal. A USB cable is sort of like this - the "housing" for the signal contacts is really a conductor too (usually embedded in molded plastic for strain relief) and sometimes it is gold plated though this is rarely necessary in practice. Obviously the contacts are almost always what we mean so why not say it accurately and say gold plated contacts when that is what you actually mean? We're engineers here on slashdot so sloppy shorthand is kind of unbecoming.
Gold plating on cable connectors isn't all that expensive even with the current cost of gold
Disclosure. I am the general manager of a company that manufactures custom wire harnesses for my day job. I buy terminals and connectors daily.
First a bit of pedantry. Connectors are assemblies typically consisting of a housing, some sort of contact and sometimes some locks or seals. Gold plating goes on the contact portion of the assembly, typically a terminal or insulation displacement contact. So saying "gold plated connector" is a bit of a non-sequitur although I understand what you mean.
When you are talking about gold plating a contact the price difference between a gold plated version and a tin or bronze or copper version typically is close to an order of magnitude. If I use a contact that would cost $0.01 in a tin version, the gold plate version will typically cost $0.07-0.10 each. Basically move the decimal point. Now this might be a relatively small cost in the overall cost of the cable assembly but it definitely isn't cheap on a component cost basis.
99.99% of the time that gold plated contacts are specified they are a complete waste of money that provides zero marginal utility to the customer. There are applications where gold is the proper material but these applications are uncommon. The vast majority of the time gold is used it is purely for marketing value to unaware consumers. It works fine but its an unnecessary extra cost most of the time.
When the existing standards have bandwidth requirements that are beyond the ability of content providers to distribute and there is virtually no planned upgrade path, further upgrades to that standard are of little/no use.
Only an idiot waits until they have requirements greater than the current hardware to build upgrade path. No we don't need it yet but eventually some people probably will. There is little point in waiting until after we already need it to build it.
Yes we really did. Heck we still fly blimps today so it's not as if the economics or performance characteristics of them are a mystery. Every decade or two someone seems to think the laws of physics and economics have been repealed and they take another run at it with predictable results. They have a few uses but passenger transport isn't going to be among them.
If you mean the lack of LTA craft was replaced by the conventional airplanes, you're right. If you mean anything else, like a certain overwrought tragedy, you're missing a lot of the actual harm because of a bright and shiny light.
The Hindenberg was merely the most celebrated of the crashes but there is no lack of others. The Shenandoah, Akron and Macon all were lost to accidents, particularly weather and there are many many more. They cannot fly at all in a stiff breeze, they a slow, they are expensive, and there quite simply are better options both aerial and terrestrial in nearly all circumstances.
Well, you won't let us do trains anymore, so what else is there?
When did I say anything about trains? Trains are demonstrably practical in a wide variety of circumstances, especially for freight but also for passengers. Airships are not practical for either passengers or freight. They have a few niche uses and that is all they will likely ever have.
News-fucking-flash: materials and propulsion technologies may have improved just a bit in the past eighty years.
News fucking flash: physics of airships has not. They are slow, bulky, cannot fly in inclement weather, require huge and expensive hangars, are expensive to operate, and no technological advance in the last 100 years has made them an economically viable replacement for jet/propeller driven aircraft. Airships had their day for transporting people and that day has passed. There are better and more sensible options in close to every circumstance you can think of for transporting both people and cargo.
Slashdot Mirror
Lightning Network should allow it to be used as a currency.
Doesn't work if the exchange rate moves too quickly.
But even without use as currency, it can still be a good investment.
If you have a high tolerance for risk then maybe. You might have better odds in Vegas though.
Nobody uses gold as currency, but still they invest in it.
Gold has tangible uses aside from serving as an investment vehicle and it isn't generally very volatile relative to the dollar over short time periods. Hard to say the same about bitcoin.
No there isn't. Businesses mostly use payment gateways that sell the BTC immediately. There's no risk of price fluctuation to the business.
"Immediately" doesn't mean what you think it means. We're talking minutes to hours here which in the financial world is a far cry from "instant" and that means substantial exchange rate risk. On an asset that is fluctuating by double digit percentages within a few days that can mean a very substantial difference in value from the start of an exchange transaction to the finish. Saying there is no risk of price fluctuation is quite simply wrong.
Why ? Bitcoin is not a stock, and the Bitcoin exchanges don't function like stock markets.
If you are buying bitcoin hoping it will appreciate in value relative to the dollar then it is a secondary market and as such it functions almost identically to a stock market as a practical matter. Bitcoin is just an asset like gold or beenie babies or pork bellies or frozen concentrated orange juice. Any discussion about the "value" of bitcoin is by definition in relation to how many dollars you can get for it which is no different than asking what the current price of a stock is in dollars. Stocks are assets and so is bitcoin.
Late Wednesday, finance author Ben Carlson wrote:
Bitcoin has achieved something I've always wanted to see in the stock mkt - a reverse 1987 (20% gain in a single day)
Whoever wrote that is an idiot. No we do not want to see that kind of volatility in the market, positive or negative. That is NOT a good thing. Any time something skyrockets that fast in price it is pretty much invariably because something weapons grade irrational and/or criminal is going on. This is what happens with pump and dump schemes and those rarely end happily.
I think it's more accurate to say that not all plastic products can be economically recycled.
I did say exactly that. ("A depressing percentage of the plastic products sold cannot be economically recycled") We agree.
It isn't, for example, economical to recycle single-use plastic bags because they contain so little plastic that transporting them is likely to use more oil than you recover from the bags. And polystyrene is mostly air, which has the same problem. But that's really an issue with the way the plastics are used rather than something fundamental to the material.
Yep. I think this is going have to be something that gets regulated at some point. I don't like the idea of doing that but I don't see a feasible alternative. It's kind of a tragedy of the commons situation. It's cheap for us individually to use a disposable plastic fork but expensive for society in the long run thanks to the pollution and wasted energy.
I think the arguments that we're going to be mining trash heaps in the future for plastic are preposterous. There are FAR too many hydrocarbons yet to be mined to make digging up trash heaps economically viable. It's simply likely to remain cheaper to make new plastic from fresh fossil fuels. Even if we somehow run out of oil, gas and coal without rendering the planet uninhabitable in the process, there are bioplastics. I think the difficult bit will be to keep people from making fresh plastic (esp one use) when we do not need to. Perhaps more pressing will be solving the problem of microbeads and similar plastic waste.
The only one I'm aware of that would truly be uneconomical because of the nature of the material is PVC, and even that is improving, I think.
PVC can be recycled for the most part.
I'm not about to dig into the math (just don't care that much) and I'm highly dubious of what I've read regarding power consumption but if bitcoin is truly that power hungry and inefficient then it is doomed to failure. It simply will cost more than the alternatives and that matters greatly. Sure some people can make some profits playing a game of who's the greater fool but that is a bubble that will pop sooner or later. It's just another tulip craze. It has to have some economic advantage over other currencies to be worth the bother in the long run to most people.
Basically some people are spending a huge amount of money trying to convert energy into bitcoin and bitcoin transactions in the hopes that the price will rise enough to make it worth the investment. Might work in the short run but there is a LOT of risk there.
If it creates a worldwide non-government controlled currency, it will be worth the struggle.
You say that as if it is somehow axiomatic. I reject your framing of the argument. If you can provide some airtight argument that government involvement in currency has some fatal flaw then please provide it and collect your Nobel prize. But frankly I don't buy the argument that bitcoin or any analog of it really fixes any problems in any form of government issued currency without creating new and potentially worse ones in the process. If you distrust governments as a philosophical position I can understand that but it doesn't automatically follow that because governments aren't perfect that a solution that doesn't involve them will necessarily be better.
Then of course there is the problem that there is absolutely no way that governments are going to allow a currency that they have no influence over. Even if government leaders honestly and earnestly wanted to not be involved with the currency the first moment there is a dip in the market there will be people screaming for the government to do something about the problem. The governments would HAVE to be involved in regulating currency even if they didn't want to. Not to mention that truly unregulated markets tend to crash and burn hard. There will never be a currency market without government regulation no matter what the mechanics of the currency might be.
Bitcoin wasn't intended to be an investment instrument.
They created a cash analog and didn't think it would be used as an investment vehicle? Then they are (as I suspected) imbeciles with little understanding of economics and less of people. Kind of like the programmers in the early days of networks that failed to secure their networks because they naively trusted other people's incentives to match their own.
Its creators envisioned it as a replacement for money itself -- a decentralized, secure, anonymous method for transferring value between people.
It's not a replacement for money because it IS a form of money for all practical purposes. Just because it isn't a fiat currency doesn't change that fact. But like any asset (including currency) it will be used both for transactions and as a mechanism to profit directly through trading of that asset. If there is a profit to be made you can be sure someone will try to make it.
Simply put, bitcoin is slowing the effort to achieve a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. What's more, this is just the beginning. Given its rapidly growing climate footprint, bitcoin is a malignant development, and it's getting worse. Digital financial transactions come with a real-world price: The tremendous growth of cryptocurrencies has created an exponential demand for computing power
Exponential? Let's grant that for the sake of argument. Even if true it doesn't mean it is appropriate to extrapolate naively. Just because it might be experiencing fast growth today does not imply that it will continue to do so tomorrow. You have to give some reason why it MUST be expected to continue to grow at that rate which this article fails to do.
Today, each bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power nine homes in the U.S. for one day.
Oh bullshit. That's just preposterous on the face of it unless you are using an incredibly stupid (and faulty) form of accounting and assigning all the power costs for every computer involved in the transaction and presuming it does nothing else.
And that power-hungry network is currently increasing its energy use every day by about 450 gigawatt-hours, roughly the same amount of electricity the entire country of Haiti uses in a year.
Again, I call bullshit. This sounds like hollywood accounting to me to try to scare people. I think bitcoin is kind of idiotic but I would need a LOT of serious evidence before I seriously believe this sort of outlandish claim.
Those are very much the exception rather than the rule; wood stands up to hot/cold cycles and UV rays far better than plastic, is more comfortable to grip than plastic (especially in extreme temps) and doesn't off-gas a cocktail of cancer-causing and endocrine-disrupting vapors.
Plastic isn't a single chemical. There are all sorts of plastics with all sorts of properties. For particular applications many of them easily outperform wood. Wood can be a fine thing to use too but to pretend that it outperforms plastic as a general proposition without specifying the application is simply willful ignorance or confirmation bias.
Unlike using oil for powering cars, you don't destroy the oil when you turn it into plastics. You can heat it, optionally crack and reform the polymer chains to turn it into an entirely new kind of plastic, and turn it into something else.
Not true for all plastics. Not because of technical problems but because it isn't economically profitable to do so. It's cheaper to put them in a landfill and make new plastic out of oil products than it is to go to the expense and trouble of recycling them.
If anyone is actually using incinerators on plastics rather than separating them for recycling, that is, of course, short-sighted idiocy.
A depressing percentage of the plastic products sold cannot be economically recycled. Only plastics of select chemical compositions are accepted for recycling most places.
Why has demand increased while global energy efficiency has also increased? population increased!
Good thought but demand per capita has also increased which means the rate of consumption has increased faster than the population growth.
We should compare things like micro-hydro power with fossil fuels.
Compare them for what? Subsistence living? Small scale hydro is a Good Thing but for most people it's hardly going to be enough to meaningfully displace fossil fuels except as a very small part of a larger energy portfolio. Solar and wind are far more practical in most circumstances, even for local generation. I couldn't use micro-hydro anywhere close to my house because it's so geographically dependent and it's not an option at all for almost anyone not living in a fairly remote area.
Fossil fuels put the poor at the mercy of global markets, disappearing and becoming more expensive every time there is a war or the wrong kind of financial crisis.
No reasonably foreseeable amount of small scale local power generation is going to change that fact. Even if I put enough renewable energy into my house to power all my needs (including an EV), that still won't affect the impact on of fluctuating energy costs on manufacturing, transport, and agriculture. Modern agriculture is basically the process of turning diesel fuel into food and nearly all our transport systems are tied to fossil fuels currently. What needs to be emphasized is that we need a diverse portfolio of energy sources to mitigate economic disruptions from geopolitics. An important part of this will be local generation (solar roofs, etc) but we'll also need technologies for transport that aren't tied to fossil fuels (EVs) and for fossil fuels to actually have to bear the full cost of the pollution they generate.
And yes you are quite right about one use plastics. That's a much bigger problem than most people realize.
Bacteria that had not been there during the launch of the ISS module were found on the swabs,
Umm, how would they possibly know that the bacteria was not there? It's not as if they have some means of sterilizing on the launch pad and It's not hard to show how a previously unknown bacteria could have been missed. Not to mention that there is such a thing as mutations, particularly in a high radiation environment.
So they have flown from somewhere in space and settled on the outside hull.
Unless they have some means to conclusively rule out all sources of terrestrial contamination (and they do not) then this is the same sort of idiotic thinking that makes people think a UFO = alien visitors when they are forgetting what the U in UFO stands for.
I've seen non-gold coax cables bind to the other receptacle and contacts tear off because they were not gold plated and were two different metals, like tin and copper. Gold works as a great in-between that keeps my items from binding.
Not arguing that there aren't applications for gold plating. There certainly are. Most common use is for corrosion resistance since gold is relatively non-reactive compared with other common metals used in conductors. Point is that such applications are the exception rather than the rule and that most gold plating on consumer applications are a waste of money, brains and time.
So you understood what he meant, I understood what he meant, everyone understood what he meant, he used common language terms that everyone uses, and yet you criticized him for it?
I didn't criticize him, I corrected his terminology and hopefully educated in the process. By your userID number you've been here long enough to know that if you say something technically inaccurate someone will correct you. It's happened to me too and I learn things when it happens. Just because lay people commonly say something incorrect does not in the world of engineering make it correct. Just because people commonly refer to concrete as cement does not mean that they are the same thing. Concrete is a composite material bonded together with cement but cement is not concrete and no amount of common parlance will make it the correct term. Same with connectors versus contacts. Contacts are a component of a connector. Saying "gold plated connector" isn't the correct terminology and I don't think it is asking the sorts of geeks that hang out here to be accurate with their terminology. We don't have to reduce ourselves to marketing speak here.
This is what makes dealing with some specialists (like yourself) so much harder than it has any need to be.
Only to self righteous people such as yourself. Calm down. I said up front that it was a pedantic point and said it to ensure clarity and educate.
As the average person buys the entire assembly, and not just a contact, the relevant comparison is the price of the entire assembly, not the price of the component. So "isn't all that expensive" is completely accurate.
Except it often is not accurate at all. That's the point. I buy this stuff for a living and I know exactly how much it costs. Sometimes the cost of gold plating is a rounding error and sometimes it's a double digit percentage of the cost. Depends on the product. You cannot make a blanked statement that gold plating isn't expensive until you actually can evaluate the bill of materials for that product and know something about the labor content involved. What you can say as a blanket statement is that the vast majority of the time (over 99%) it is unnecessary and needlessly increases costs.
This is the one place you're completely correct.
Gee thanks for the condescension. I'm glad you know more about what I do for a living than I do.
So what about coax connectors?
What about them? Unless you have gold plated every component in a connector assembly, saying gold plated connector remains an inaccurate description. I cannot recall ever seeing such a beast though perhaps they do exist for some weird reason.
You don't test software by looking at the code. You test the software by testing it. If it ain't broken, you're not testing hard enough.
Doing a black box analysis of software when the code should be available for review by a defendant is so wrong headed I barely know where to start There is NO place for secret code when it comes to convicting people of crimes. The defendant should be able to question any and all methods being used to accuse them of a crime.
While I'm very pro-OSS, I'm anti forcing private companies to disclose their source code.
Tell me that when you are facing a life sentence and you aren't allowed to examine the code being used to send you to jail. If we're talking about a word processor, who cares but when we're talking about felony convictions for crimes I see no value to society in companies being allowed to keep such code private.
Arguably, the program can be evaluated without the source code.
At considerable expense. But even then it still is a problem because you would have to do it for every single case. Otherwise you have no way to know if something is different or wrong with the analysis in a case where no verification was conducted.
Simply use known samples and examine the output. Do the results of the analysis match what was known about the samples?
You're talking about using controls and/or independent testing methods. Not really good enough because if there is a discrepancy you run into Segal's Law (a man with a watch knows the time and a man with two is never sure). You have no way to know which test (if either) is the correct one. You would need to do those sorts of independent verification but you still cannot really accept any analysis in a court of law where the defendant cannot evaluate the methodology used to accuse them.
Only an idiot claims that an upgrade is needed when it will not be needed for the foreseeable future.
Who are you to decide what other people might need in the foreseeable future? You have to have the hardware in place for people to develop content for it. Some people probably have a use for 10K content even if you lack the imagination to see what it is today.
Sometimes they gold plate the housing since many of them are made of metal and in some cases they serve some transmission purposes, usually ground but occasionally signal. A USB cable is sort of like this - the "housing" for the signal contacts is really a conductor too (usually embedded in molded plastic for strain relief) and sometimes it is gold plated though this is rarely necessary in practice. Obviously the contacts are almost always what we mean so why not say it accurately and say gold plated contacts when that is what you actually mean? We're engineers here on slashdot so sloppy shorthand is kind of unbecoming.
Gold plating on cable connectors isn't all that expensive even with the current cost of gold
Disclosure. I am the general manager of a company that manufactures custom wire harnesses for my day job. I buy terminals and connectors daily.
First a bit of pedantry. Connectors are assemblies typically consisting of a housing, some sort of contact and sometimes some locks or seals. Gold plating goes on the contact portion of the assembly, typically a terminal or insulation displacement contact. So saying "gold plated connector" is a bit of a non-sequitur although I understand what you mean.
When you are talking about gold plating a contact the price difference between a gold plated version and a tin or bronze or copper version typically is close to an order of magnitude. If I use a contact that would cost $0.01 in a tin version, the gold plate version will typically cost $0.07-0.10 each. Basically move the decimal point. Now this might be a relatively small cost in the overall cost of the cable assembly but it definitely isn't cheap on a component cost basis.
99.99% of the time that gold plated contacts are specified they are a complete waste of money that provides zero marginal utility to the customer. There are applications where gold is the proper material but these applications are uncommon. The vast majority of the time gold is used it is purely for marketing value to unaware consumers. It works fine but its an unnecessary extra cost most of the time.
When the existing standards have bandwidth requirements that are beyond the ability of content providers to distribute and there is virtually no planned upgrade path, further upgrades to that standard are of little/no use.
Only an idiot waits until they have requirements greater than the current hardware to build upgrade path. No we don't need it yet but eventually some people probably will. There is little point in waiting until after we already need it to build it.
What's the point of a 4K command line, anyway?
A whole bunch of them at once without overlap. Or *gasp* maybe doing something else at the same time. I know, crazy right?
We really didn't.
Yes we really did. Heck we still fly blimps today so it's not as if the economics or performance characteristics of them are a mystery. Every decade or two someone seems to think the laws of physics and economics have been repealed and they take another run at it with predictable results. They have a few uses but passenger transport isn't going to be among them.
If you mean the lack of LTA craft was replaced by the conventional airplanes, you're right. If you mean anything else, like a certain overwrought tragedy, you're missing a lot of the actual harm because of a bright and shiny light.
The Hindenberg was merely the most celebrated of the crashes but there is no lack of others. The Shenandoah, Akron and Macon all were lost to accidents, particularly weather and there are many many more. They cannot fly at all in a stiff breeze, they a slow, they are expensive, and there quite simply are better options both aerial and terrestrial in nearly all circumstances.
Well, you won't let us do trains anymore, so what else is there?
When did I say anything about trains? Trains are demonstrably practical in a wide variety of circumstances, especially for freight but also for passengers. Airships are not practical for either passengers or freight. They have a few niche uses and that is all they will likely ever have.
News-fucking-flash: materials and propulsion technologies may have improved just a bit in the past eighty years.
News fucking flash: physics of airships has not. They are slow, bulky, cannot fly in inclement weather, require huge and expensive hangars, are expensive to operate, and no technological advance in the last 100 years has made them an economically viable replacement for jet/propeller driven aircraft. Airships had their day for transporting people and that day has passed. There are better and more sensible options in close to every circumstance you can think of for transporting both people and cargo.